


Something’s Gotta Give

by remembertowrite



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Baby Fic, F/M, Pregnancy, Spoilers through 201, Trust Issues, rated T only for a few instances of swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-02-05
Packaged: 2018-05-18 07:58:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5909104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remembertowrite/pseuds/remembertowrite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wrestling with inner and outer demons. Alex externalizes it. Strand bottles it up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something’s Gotta Give

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to [Tumblr](http://remembertowrite.tumblr.com/post/137825087113/trying-out-some-black-tapes-fic) on 1/22/16

It was supposed to be a good day. Amid the emotional turmoil and sleepless nights of the past two and a half months, today was going to be a much deserved reprieve—a happy moment, even, like an awkward but excited reunion of old friends who’ve grown into new strangers. She imagines seeing Amalia again, grabbing her into a tight hug, cursing herself for taking the mere act of her friend’s continued existence for granted. She thinks of her mother, who she hasn’t called in far too long, because she’s been secretly terrified since she first found out.

She barely feels the cold jelly on her stomach, the unpleasant push of the transducer probe, the tighter and tighter grip she has around Strand’s hand. She sees it, and she’s sure he’s seen it too.

There on the monitor, swaddling her unborn child like a guillotine cradles a prisoner’s neck, appears the unmistakable smudge of a dark figure.

###

It’s unbelievable how much his life has changed. It seems one day he’s content, if not stoic (Cora Lee used to poke his chest and declare that he had less emotional maturity than a bee. She’d follow with a joke: ‘But you’re still my honey!’). The next, he works by cool, low lamplight in the learned silence of university halls drained of their daytime student lifeblood. The very next, he paces up and down the tiny length of Alex’s apartment, wrestling fears that freeze him mid-stride, so that it becomes an awkward stutter-step: _too-old, not-married, too-complicated, not-again, too-scared, not-safe_.

Not safe.

Shadows of memories that blur around the edges from nineteen years of bullheaded skepticism twist in his gut, memories of shadows he knows he made up to ease the wreckage of Hurricane Cora Lee.

Not again.

His stutter-step halts in front of the glaring woman, her evident impatience tinged with riptide rage. She clutches the white stick in her hand like a it’s a life preserver. He dreads the bursting of the dam.

“Alex,” he intones, the sweet confused intimacy of her given name cresting off his tongue, “Think about this rationally. I’m fifty-four.”

Upon a further inquiring glance: “I never wanted children after Charlie.”

He watches her put her hands on her hips, how her face softens as she reconsiders the aggressive gesture. The warmth of her palm finds his shoulder underneath his starchy button-up.

“It’s okay. I can do this by myself.” He scans her tiny one-bedroom, and her reaction rings curt and displeased over the dull ambulance sirens and rain. “Don’t patronize me, Richard.”

He nods, and is reminded of the tenacious blue ink stain on his third favorite shirt. Her hand presses harder on his shoulder, and it’s like she says it to his face: _What are you so scared of?_

He takes the plunge.

“It’s unsettling that you think you’d be alone.” He lets a beat go by. “I’ll be here.”

She deflates, the puffed up feminine fury leaving her face.

“Okay.”

And the water sweetly fills his lungs.

###

At twenty weeks, she never has to ask for a seat on the train. Even still, the commute to Pacific Northwest Stories every day fatigues her.

She’s exhausted all the time, and the insomnia has gotten worse. A Google search tells her most women don’t sleep well during pregnancy. Google doesn’t provide statistics on the number of pregnant women who see shadows smile in the periphery and hear scratches on the walls. The nights he’s there, he repeats it like a lullaby: _Apophenia, Alex_. She clings to it on the nights he’s not.

She perseveres with the podcast, and sometimes she’s so grateful that she works in a non-visual medium. Her personal life stays below a veneer of distanced professionalism. It’s a good thing, because her understanding of her personal life is as murky as the figure that blights the ultrasound picture she took home from the hospital so long ago.

So when Strand shows up this time, she feels something off. He may be hard to read, but she cuts right through his bullshit.

“Can you just tell me what it is?”

He rubs his hands together nervously. She sometimes forgets that this man was married, once.

“I’ve taken a sabbatical from the institute. I’m moving to Seattle, and I’d like to live here. With you.” He shifts.

Typical Richard: Stubborn and domineering, deciding to move to Seattle before even talking to her, choosing to be reliable and responsible and support her. Of course he asks to live with her and have a child with her before enlightening her of what, if any, feelings he has.

“That depends,” she responds, frustrated.

“I’m not that good at this,” he admits. “With Cora Lee, with Charlie, with everything that happened to me. But I want to try.”

It’s always going to be confusing. They’re an odd pair. Photos of them have a knack of getting smudged with darkness.

She scowls when she loses half her closet space to his suits.

###

He nurses his coffee. It was a bad idea to have this conversation in a public place. She frowns, gives his hand an awkward stroke.

“You understand, right? It can’t happen again. It’s a major breach of ethics for me if it were to be anything more.”

She normally frustrates him with her lack of skepticism, but he esteems her too highly to risk her career. He understands, shrewd academic he is.

Still, his coffee is especially bitter this morning. He floods his mouth with its pungent realism.

“Yes. It could present many issues,” he agrees, placing his coffee cup as a kind of wall of professionalism between them. She doesn’t reach out to touch him again.

“Thank you,” she responds.

Before the next time he comes to Seattle, he duct-tapes his Alex-related feelings to a cement block and thrusts it into the ocean of his memories, the same body of water where he buried Cora Lee at sea.

###

She feels bad for Richard as he spends his Saturday night scrubbing down the black mold growing in the closet. Between her exhaustion and the fact that she’s seven months pregnant, she doesn’t pitch in with the more physically taxing chores anymore.

“We really should contact the landlord,” he grumbles between scrubs, “Could even send a certified letter demanding response to water damage.”

“The plumber didn’t find anything. Besides, it’s refreshing to watch Dr. Strand on his knees,” she teases. (She wonders if Cora Lee used to tease him. She wonders if he wonders about Cora Lee. She wonders if Cora Lee is actually just dead.)

She hears him groan that he’s too old for this shit, and she snorts. Domestic bliss at its best. The good doctor’s war on closet mold is lost for the day, and they retire to the bedroom. Sleep is a ship she passes in the night.

The figure enters their bedroom and cocks its head like a curious dog. It doesn’t have eyes but she feels it staring at her. Her muscles ignore her brain’s smoke signals for help, despite thousands of prickles scampering along her limbs. She’s lost her voice in the heap of clothes that haven’t yet made the voyage to the hamper. The figure plunges its hand into her torso, cutting straight through her skin, producing a sickening sound of squishing flesh. Her mouth makes a silent ring of horror.

Her waking self is reduced to throbbing pain and heart palpitations. She screams and screams, at the shadows hissing at her, at Richard’s worried voice, at the number tones of 9-1-1 on the phone.

At the hospital, she hears Richard breathe a sigh of relief as the doctors tell her the baby is safe. The abstract mural of green and blue and black on her body will fade. Her paranoia will not.

On the ride home, she shakes the duloxetine bottle like a baby rattle over and over.

###

It’s sudden and intense and hurried, but not unexpected. It’s not something he hasn’t thought about. From the moment he returned her eleven calls in a fit of annoyance, he could tell. She reminded him of Cora Lee, somewhat: strong-willed, independent, wouldn’t back down from his assertive skepticism. He’s felt the war inside him, his respect for her, irritation with her, and attraction to her, her persistent stabs at his weak points.

He’s a little ashamed she found him at his most vulnerable, and that’s he’s a little drunk, and that this is how it happens, after all this time.

Her hands have knitted themselves in his hair and, feeling slightly seasick, he takes note of her shirt lying on the floor and wonders how they got from his office to his home.

Deluged by a mishmash of feelings, he forces himself to sink into physical sensation, and doesn’t come back up for air.

###

Fingers of flame ravish her home, groping the crib they’d bought and hissing violence into her ears. Smoke curls into dark figures everywhere she looks. An alien-looking man in heavy gear gets her out first as his counterparts outside hose down the riotous fire. She coughs deeply to protest her smoldering home. Richard finds her in the crowd of her victimized neighbors as an EMT looks her over.

They end up in the hospital, again, and the baby’s still safe, again, and she’s worse for wear, again.

She tells him she’s sure it was a demon. Her dirty glare challenges his resigned sigh.

“Alex,” he takes her hand, “do you trust me?”

Wandering around her darkened mind, she’s surprised when her flashlight illuminates shadows of doubt, the alluring darkness it has marked him with since the day she learned his wife had vanished.

“It wasn’t a demon. One of the neighbors left a lit cigarette out.” She’s expecting him to squeeze her hand into a chokehold, to make an honest ghost of her, but he doesn’t.

Just, simply: “I couldn’t have lost you. I love you.” He drags her by the hand up into the light, out of the seductive claws of her fantasies.

She rests peacefully for the first time in a year, curled contentedly into his arms, and is almost disappointed by the mundanity of a good night’s sleep.

###

“I need your help,” he admits.

It’s been three months since he’s seen or talked to her, but she pulled herself up by the straps of her galoshes and trudged through the swamp to see him. Typical Alex: Stubborn and persistent, knowing he’s hurting, deciding to turn up like this.

He tells her everything. She’s supportive, and he’s missed this. She commiserates, comforts him with a stiff drink—drinks—and he gets saturated with a kind of self-pitying false confidence.

Pulling him in close, hand on his chest, she breathes life into him, and for the first time in nineteen years, he’s not scared to break through the surface.


End file.
